How We Really Are Now (Part II: King's Lead Hat)

O’Brien makes it clear that Hunter has some kind of unreported charismatic power, but doesn’t quite explain what Edwards saw in her that would prompt him to put his campaign (and party) at risk. …

Really? Out of the many bloggers we read and respect, Mickey Kaus is no slouch in the Thinking Department, so it seems odd to us he'd need more help from O'Brien (above) to sort that particular issue out.

Especially when she opened her piece this way:

Lisa Druck was trouble,...Yet we liked her. There was something charming and feral in her aggressive bubbliness. The seedier stuff bothered my prudish self, stories of strip poker and non-monogamy. But I was seeing her ex-boyfriend and if I wanted to keep him out of the riskier stuff, I had to like her. So I did.

If you ask us, that's a lot for Ol' Mickey to work with - even if O'Brien is describing Hunter in the 1980s. Fortunately, she doesn't stop there, and paints a more recent picture of Hunter:

In 2004 I went to a dinner party for the anniversary of [our friend Jay McInerney's book] Bright Lights, Big City in New York, and there she was. She looked and acted nothing like frenetic, drama-dragging Lisa. We became fast friends, again. Lisa -- now Rielle -- was living in Boulder, in the carriage house of her former mother-in-law. I was doing publicity, website design and marketing. She wasn't doing a whole ton of anything, but she had some ideas.

A foundation was the center of the work, which we broadened to a website as a way of marketing her voice and image for a possible TV show, the "MTV guru." Rielle's friends Bob McGovern and Randy would help with logistics. We made a website. She paid for the domain name, I paid hosting. We spent five, six hours a day on the phone, gabbing and working.

She was really good at the guru stuff. Once I was on a miserable, rainy client trip. I moaned to Rielle. She was impatient, not loving my issues. "What are things you want?" she barked. I babbled about wanting prompt payment and value in my personal life. "No," she cut me off. "Money and love. Can you get those today? On this day? In the rain?" "Well, no..." I stammered. "Then focus on today. What's in front of you to do. The path. Don't be attached to outcomes. Don't DO, just BE." Oh. Ok. And the money and love came in time, as they will.

Soon the foundation and the website -- Being Is Free -- spiraled into too many months of fruitless work. I abandoned it. We spoke less, but a few months later, she was back on the beam. She had a crystal clear vision of what she wanted, and had moved to the New York area to stay with her friend Mimi. We rapidly filled in the site: her bio, cringingly titled 'Story of My Life,' a story of awakening called 'Shift Happens,' and 'Kids on Board,' the ever-important board of directors, which was mostly just a list of people helping Rielle. I came and went from this list. It was a fun gauge of how useful I was to old Lisa Druck.

Two sections remained blank: 'Fame I Am Lives Forever' and 'Where the Money Goes.' It's funny how those came in time, as they will.

As she made forays into yoga instruction in New York, there abruptly came a two-day silence. When she surfaced, it was loudly: "I met someone!" Her voice was thrilled. He must be really something. "What's his name?" "JOHN!" she sang. "Does he live in New York?" "No, North Carolina!" North Carolina? I pictured a skinny bearded guy, with enough money or mojo to catch her eye. "He's married," she quickly added, "small kids."

And there you have it. In Part I of this series, "The Safety Dance", we observed the bizarre, yet seemingly deliberate way bloggers discuss religion and spirituality, in an apparent attempt to avoid whatever troubles can arise from appearing to do so. Mickey Kaus appears to be engaged in just this behavior when he suggests that, with the wealth of information O'Brien lays at his feet, he somehow needs more before he can figure out what was going on between Edwards and Hunter.

But, in case we're wrong, let's clear it up for him:

A self-styled guru, spitting mindless pabulum like "Don't DO, just BE" (as in "Be Here Now") and is either into teaching or learning yoga to better bend over for married fathers?

The attraction was NewAge and sex, Mickey, though not necessarily always in that order.

Now before you say that's not enough for Edwards to "put his campaign (and party) at risk", we will remind you only one of them was necessary for Bill Clinton to put his presidency at risk. Also, Clinton, too, has shown a weakness for NewAge psychobabble, working as he has with Tony Robbins, and as his quoting cult leader Ken Wilber proves:

I struck up a conversation with the woman at the next event, as we waited outside. She told me her name and asked me what my astrological sign was, which I thought was a little unusual. I told her. She smiled, and began telling me her life story: how she was working as a documentary-film maker, living with a friend in South Orange, N.J., but how she'd previously had "many lives." She'd worked, she said, as an actress and as a spiritual adviser. She was fiercely devoted to astrology and New Age spirituality. She'd been a New York party girl, she'd been married and divorced, she'd been a seeker and a teacher and was a firm believer in the power of truth.

She told me that she had met Edwards at a bar, at the Regency Hotel in New York. She thought he was giving off a special "energy."

...I would soon learn that there was no such thing as small talk with Rielle Hunter. She told me that she'd felt a connection to me when we'd first met, that she could tell I was a very old soul. This meant a lot to Rielle. Her speech was peppered with New Age jargon—human beings were dragged down by "blockages" to their actual potential; history was the story of souls entering and escaping our field of consciousness. A seminal book for her had been Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now." Her purpose on this Earth, she said, was to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves.

Her latest project was John Edwards. Edwards, she said, was an old soul who had barely tapped into any of his potential. The real John Edwards, she believed, was a brilliant, generous, giving man who was driven by competing impulses—to feed his ego and serve the world. If he could only tap into his heart more, and use his head less, he had the power to be a "transformational leader" on par with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. "He has the power to change the world," she said.

I had been nodding and sipping my wine through all this. "Do you talk about this stuff with the candidate?" I asked. "All the time," Rielle replied. "I'll lecture him on it when he's getting too much up in here," she said, gesturing toward her head. "He'll see a look on my face and say, 'Yes, I know, Rielle, "Power of Now" says …' "

...She hoped that with her unique eye for Edwards's true potential, she could show the world the real John Edwards and, in the process, help him to become the better version of himself.

So what's our point? We wouldn't hesitate to place a bet that somewhere around a quarter of the Democratic Party is somehow involved in some form of NewAge spirituality or another - and all without the public's notice or understanding of how it influences their leader's choices or what a politician's occult beliefs actually mean.

We'd also be willing to wager, if the public knew these things - and we mean really knew - they'd leave the Democratic Party in droves.

2 comments:

Don't do, be - whether it's spouted by a puppet in one of Lucas' flash gordon "homages", or by the gurus of the Nazi party in the 1910s and 1920s, or by the "New Age" leaders now- is the same break-down-boundaries, do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law etc. sociopathic breeding ground it's always been.

Comments

"The Crack Emcee is the Truth-teller and the Trickster, he is the Jokerman: he is the Black Conservative who has found his own ‘Slow Train Coming.’ To repurpose a bit of Dylan history: the commenters are yelling at him ‘Judas’ and his reply is ‘I don’t believe you.’"

"In a different time and place, Crack and I knew each other pretty well and his work inspired me. Though more political and sociological, he covers a similar ground from a non-believers perspective, but is unabashedly conservative politically. Check it out, but it's deep dark water; the feints may be indistinguishable from the sincere and it's not for the faint-of-heart."

"Raising his Pimp Hand to the Lunatic Fringe. Yeah, I list him three times. You need to read his blog. Danger: You might not get it at first but I assure you that when you do, you will slap yourself in the head like the idiot you once were. Read it. Love it. Learn it. And that pile of smelly goo at yer’ feet? That’s just the entrails of your stinking idols baking in the hot sand of the Crack Emcee’s arena."

"He imbues his words with so much bite, wit and shading that a lyric sheet doesn't begin to suggest the depth of what he's conveying. What he does is articulate soul-knowledge, those truths we hide from or can't find the words for. You listen to it with mouth agape, not because it's radical in content but because it's raw and honest, unconcerned with the truth-gagging politics of celebrity -- which perhaps makes it radical after all. If Paul Mooney and Nina Simone had a baby, then ignored it, leaving it to raise itself up by its own brilliant and righteously embittered genes, the Crack Emcee would be the result."

"I have been mulling over for awhile now how I might act as a ‘force for good’ in this world. I am particularly interested in the danger associated with cults and indoctrination at all levels of the human experience. How might I help combat this? The Crack Emcee does it,...in addition to blogging on his many other interests, and he has been a big inspiration."

"Day after day, post after post, he gives incredible insight into issues we're all pursuing, but he's got this funky, incredible, hilarious, SPOT-ON take on things. He is a one-man Time Magazine, the way it SHOULD be.

"I just came across The Macho Response. A lovely blog,...that describes the writer's journey from Democrat to Republican. There are lots of pretty pictures illustrating his story. What he looks at with a particularly bright eye is the occultism that is at the core of the Democrat world view today."

"A politically-incorrect blog out in the Bay Area…There is an occasional picture that is not quite appropriate to an office environment, although I’m not sure this by itself justifies a 'NSFW' warning…language isn’t fit for family viewing. The ideas are definitely dangerous. Unsuitable opinions. Terrible taste. Pictures of strange ugly creatures. Yup, we’re cousins, alright,...I’m certainly gonna read this 'Macho Response' guy."

As a former homeopathic 'doctor', I commend you for your bravery and brilliance.

Your blog is like an antidote to the 'New' Age too-cool-for-school-aid that America's been drinking like it's going out style...which, with the help of brilliant minds like you, hopefully it is. The sooner the better, for all our sakes.

I can't thank you enough for saving me from the eau de toilet/oprahahaha cesspool..."